


terroir

by Sciosa



Series: ceylon [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Soft Apocalypse, anyway ALSO IN CEYLON SO NOT CANON COMPLIANT, but to be fair that's a big ask, discussion of various fears, jon being not completely human anymore but Trying His Best, jon is not great at describing his weird beholding senses in human terms, martin... also trying his best, not as fluffy as my usual shit tbh, not like depressing just kinda "oh. man.", this is like... one part martin's pov on ceylon and one part an excuse to use an amusing title, this one's a little bittersweet ya'll strap in
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 11:31:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21319495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sciosa/pseuds/Sciosa
Summary: "It's like wine. The environment, the circumstances it grows in, changes the fear."
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Series: ceylon [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1532459
Comments: 43
Kudos: 907





	terroir

_Okay, well… do me a favour, try to… explain them to me._

**You already know what they are?**

_Not like you do. I’m not… they don’t feed me. They’re just fears._

**Yes. That’s what they’re like.**

_But if you’re afraid of them--_

**No, I’m not afraid of them. But fear is what they are.**

_I don’t--_

**Mm. Okay. Like this-- you feel fear in… here? In your body. That’s where you feel things. You live in that. I don’t live in that anymore.**

_...oh._

* * *

Martin K. Blackwood loves Jonathan Sims.

There’s nothing to be done about that-- it’s a fact. He can no more control that than he can… will his eyes to be a different color, or regrow the appendix that was removed when he was eight. It’s an immutable reality, ground down into his DNA, so thoroughly incorporated that even supernatural forces never quite managed to pick it out of him, like tiny shards of fool’s gold ingrained in lapis. He loves Jon in future imperfect-- he will have loved Jon, indefinitely, for what must be forever.

It’s true even when he’s two steps removed from reality, watching it through the thin gauze of the Lonely, a pale world without context or meaning.

“I know that you not being here is the point,” says Jon Sims, the man Martin loves, from the compact little huddle he’s made of himself against the side of the desk.

He’s right. (Jon is usually right. Not always in the way he thinks; but usually.) That is the point. It’s the point of a lot of things, but presently it’s the point of this-- of loving Jon, but not touching him. Of longing, but with the kind of chilly remove that real Loneliness offers. Martin is an offering to a hungry god, and he is the priest casting himself on the altar.

“But I… I just need you to be here,” Jon says, “Just for a minute. Please.”

He’s a little hoarse. Martin thinks, abstractly, that he must not be talking much to the others. Maybe he only talks to the tape recorders, now. Maybe they’re lonely together. There’s something a little romantic about that, in a terrible way that feeds him. 

“Okay,” says Jon, at length. He sounds unutterably weary. He sounds heartbroken. He sounds like the first sigh of a ghost. “That’s fair. Thank you for all the tea.”

And then he leaves.

Martin watches him go and loves him and thinks, _That’s that done._

And then he gets to work on the scheduling.

* * *

**What did you think they would be like?**

_I don’t know! A… a taste, or something._

**Hmm. Maybe. I don’t think I have the right words. You’re the poet.**

_Oh, shut up._

**I like them.**

_Well, I can’t write you poetry about things I can’t experience._

**You know one of them.**

_... I don’t-- um._

**What did the One Alone taste like?**

_..._

**Oh.**

_It’s alright._

**Oh.**

* * *

It’s a very short time later that everything changes, and Martin finds himself standing alone in an office he’s been scarcely occupying for weeks, with a cold cup of tea on the corner of the desk. Jon isn’t there, and he doesn’t know where Jon _is_, but he knows-- immediately, without doubt or question, he _knows_\-- that Jon is gone.

It takes him a while to realize he’s crying.

It takes him a while longer to realize why.

* * *

**... Desolation is like ash.**

_You don’t have to humor me._

**No, I’m-- I don’t mean it tastes like that. I don’t think I can really explain the way I know them. It’s a sense that I don’t think you have. But that’s as close as I can get. They call it the Lightless Flame, but it isn’t… really. The fear isn’t the burning, it’s the soot-black greasy smear it leaves behind. It’s knowing there was something you loved and it’s gone now.**

_... that’s--_

**Ash.**

* * *

For almost three months, Jon is gone, and Martin watches what might as well be his corpse stare into empty space while hundreds-- maybe thousands, it’s hard to keep track-- of eyes shift around him, moving around their epicenter in synchronized waves like ocean tides. Sometimes there will be a light, a kind of corona, a solar flare that _thinks_, haloing him. Martin knows, instinctively, that this is the Watcher’s Crown, and that this is the Watcher, and that this is all there is.

And he also knows, in a bedrock way that can’t be moved, that he loves Jon.

So Jon still has to be there. _Somewhere_.

He has to be.

* * *

**Then, hm… the Web, I suppose. I used to be afraid of spiders, do you remember?**

_Yeah. Yeah, yes, I remember._

**Hm. It isn’t spiders, though, really. It looks like spiders, sometimes, but that’s just shorthand. It’s a kind of… very specific claustrophobia. Being trapped in your own skin, while something else does your walking and talking and being. It’s, mm, you’d feel it like… sleep paralysis, maybe. You just wouldn’t belong to you anymore.**

_... oh._

**It’s alright. You’re mine, they know.**

_... that’s good._

* * *

Martin has been a caretaker for most of his life.

First it was looking after himself, when he was young, and then it was looking after his mother, too. He looks after his coworkers, and when he has friends he looks after them, and occasionally he’ll get a little overwrought and look after nice young people he sees on the street who look overwhelmed and in need of help. (Which, yes, has gotten him very politely robbed once or twice, but those are the perils of random acts of kindness.)

He’s been trying to take care of Jon Sims basically since the day he met him, because Martin has never met anyone less suited to taking care of themselves in his life. It’s like he doesn’t have a single survival instinct anywhere in his body-- maybe he’s too full of Facts and Sarcasm to fit any in-- and his reaction to having any kind of normal human need is grumpy confusion that he is expected to, for example, eat occasionally. Martin absolutely _should not_ find this charming, but here he is, trying to insinuate tea into Jon’s life to keep him hydrated and worrying about how late he’s going to stay at the archives if no one reminds him that it’s twenty minutes to the last train.

Somehow, all of that gets worse at the same moment that it gets better.

Jon doesn’t need to eat anymore. Or maybe he’s eating statements, just plucking them raw out of the ether, sifting through reality for the trauma that sustains him, filter-feeding on existence. As far as Martin can tell he doesn’t sleep, either. He barely even blinks. He just sits there, behind his desk, surrounded by eyes and tape recorders and stacks of statements that he isn’t reading.

Martin tries tidying them up-- Jon doesn’t notice, or… well, he probably notices, if the eyes are any indication, but he doesn’t object-- but no matter where or how he files them, somehow there are always more, filling up the office whenever he’s not paying close enough attention. When he actually looks through a few of them, he finds that they aren’t all even statements-- some of them are dissertations, or newspaper articles, private diaries, family recipes, once even a child’s drawing. Not even a sinister child’s drawing, just a very small house cramped into one corner, in blue crayon, with a disproportionately large cat drawn on most of the page. (He knows it’s a cat because it’s labelled, rather than because of any particular artistic skill. He tries not to wonder if this was what Jon’s handwriting looked like as a child; he’s not sure which answer would be better.)

The tapes he’s not recording keep showing up, too. Martin finds them in corners, under desks, stacked in perilous towers through the hallways. None of them are in Jon’s voice-- they couldn’t be, Jon doesn’t talk anymore, not with his own mouth-- and Martin doesn’t realize who’s reading them until he tracks down one of the statement givers and realizes the tape is in _hers_. She insists that she _wrote_ her statement for the Institute, a couple of years ago. So do the three others that Martin is able to convince to talk to him despite the eyes hovering ominously over his shoulder, floating through these people’s houses and staring at the photos on their walls, the contents of the cupboards, their carpets. He supposes that they’re cataloguing all of it, for some reason, as if the color of the bedspread in Charles Montgomery’s house is going to be important to the story he absolutely didn’t speak into a tape recorder, but which Martin found recorded in his voice, tucked between the fronds of a fake plant.

Jon doesn’t seem to actually _need_ any of that, though, or even notice it most of the time. He doesn’t react when Martin files them or doesn’t, pursues leads or ignores them. He just sits at his desk, stares at nothing, takes up a space that looks like Jon. It’s the coma all over again, except this time he’s still breathing-- most of the time-- and whatever he’s dreaming, he’s doing it awake.

Martin makes tea just because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Jon doesn’t notice that either.

* * *

_How about, uh… the Spiral, then?_

**It Is Not What It Is.**

_Right, sure._

**... that’s what it is.**

_... I don’t think I understand._

**Yes, exactly.**

* * *

Every now and then, he’ll do something that makes Martin think he’s really Jon. That’s maybe the worst part-- the moments when he’ll smile, a little bit, and it looks like Jon’s smile, the one that he never seemed quite practiced with that would sort of creep onto his face cautiously, like he was waiting to be told he wasn’t allowed to. Or he’ll be sitting there all blank and remote, and then suddenly he’ll blink-- all of the eyes in the room will blink-- and he’ll make that little humming noise that he used to make when he was deep into a research trance and found something interesting, or tilt his head slightly at nothing.

And then he’ll do something horrifying, like walk calmly out of a yellow door that shouldn’t exist in his office-- Helen’s voice echoing down the corridors, chiding and irritated, “Very rude, Archivist,” that he doesn’t acknowledge. Or he’ll inform Martin, after holding the whole world in a heartstopping moment of terror, that he _Watches_. He’ll say “we”, and it’s achingly clear that no human person is part of that group. He’ll let Melanie stab him in the chest with a pen, _multiple times_, and just watch her do it, unconcerned, unbloodied and barely interested.

It’s like living with the echo of a person.

* * *

**I Do Not Know You is… pilomotor reflex.**

_I’m, I’m sorry, what?_

**The shiver down your spine. Knowing something is wrong, not knowing what it is, trying to make yourself bigger and scarier than whatever it is. You can’t be bigger than the Stranger, though, you’re only human. That’s just what it feels like. A fear that’s enough like you that you want to fight it.**

_Like. Um, like Tim, then._

**... maybe.**

* * *

It takes Martin about a week to realize that Peter Lukas isn’t in the Institute anymore.

To be fair, he’d never seen _much_ of the man, and considering the way Martin was ripped unceremoniously out of the fog he assumes the Watcher’s world is just naturally anathema to Forsaken. But eventually it occurs to him that Peter probably would have said… _something_ about this turn of events, if he was still around and had anything _resembling_ a plan.

And Elias is, as far as Martin is aware, still in jail. At the very least, he isn’t here either.

Which means Martin doesn’t really _have_ a specific job anymore? Not that he would probably be doing it anyway-- there doesn’t seem to be any point, with Jon downstairs not being himself and the world outside being… whatever it is now. _Observed._ Honestly, he isn’t that clear on what’s happening in the wider world right now-- when he _has_ ventured out, he hasn’t gone much farther than Hackney Downs, always accompanied by at least one of the hovering eyes, and people take one look at that and give him a wide berth. (It might even feel a little lonely, if they weren’t also taking every opportunity to stare at him; he’s beginning to understand a little of the paranoia that gripped Jon, what seems like decades ago.)

What he does know is that somehow everyone just _knows_ that the Institute is where the problem (if it _is_ a problem?) started, and some people are getting distinctly… antsy about it. 

A lot of the staff walked out shortly after it became obvious that their workplace was the epicenter of whatever had happened to the world. Rosie didn’t, though. She’s still at her desk in the foyer, humming to herself whenever she isn’t doing arcane secretarial things and smiling pleasantly at the eyes that zip past her. She watched Martin rush down to the Archives that first day, cheerfully telling him he looked better, and since then she’s watched him trek back and forth from the break room with tea, and she’s answered an astonishing volume of calls that she refuses to explain to him-- “Don’t you worry about it, dear, you just focus on the important things,” is all she’ll tell him, with a nod towards the Archives, whenever he asks-- and she’s kept an eye on the suspicious number of people who have started congregating outside the building at odd hours.

“No pitchforks yet, but they have the look,” she explains. She doesn’t seem overly concerned about it. She’s been more visibly worried about Martin sleeping in the Archives than she is about a potential mob. Martin’s not sure what exactly that says about her priorities.

And the thing is: Elias and Peter aren’t here. No one else has shown up to take on the job. _Someone_ should probably try to make sure the Institute isn’t besieged by a lot of angry Londoners.

Martin would really like for that someone to not be him, but Martin very rarely gets what he wants.

* * *

**The Buried is dirt, obviously.**

_I… suppose that makes sense._

**Good dirt, though. Grow-things-in-it dirt. You’re fertilizer, deep far down where the nutrients of you leech out into the world in little bits and pieces, so you grow up into green things. It isn’t really interested in that part, but I like that part.**

_That’s… that’s nice, I guess. In a way._

**Yes, I thought so.**

* * *

It isn’t actually much of a transition. He was practically running the Institute the entire time Peter was in charge anyway. If anything, the job has gotten simpler, since fully 60% of the staff have walked out. (_Quit_, he thinks, and feels a little sick, but he’s called some of them and though they’re all very skeptical to be getting calls from the Institute right now, none of them are reporting any ill effects. He knows what to expect, from Tim, and it’s not happening. He’s not sure what to think about that.)

Of course, no one who’s left has any idea what they should be _doing_. Following up on old cases of questionable paranormal significance seems… _deeply_ inadequate in the wake of reality unfolding a layer of itself to reveal at least one cosmic horror lurking beneath the surface. But nearly everyone who works for the Magnus Institute-- _certainly_ everyone who stayed-- is the type that can’t leave well enough alone, that has to pick and prod and process the evidence until every secret is revealed.

He sets them all on researching the Eye.

He doesn’t know if they’ll find anything _useful_, if there’s even anything to find, but it’s hard to argue that it’s not the most _relevant_ topic to study at the moment.

And if they _do_ find something... 

If they find something, he’ll figure it out.

In the interim, an inexplicable number of applications are coming _in_ from people who want to work here now that the world _already has_ ended, so that’s… definitely going to keep him busy.

(And if he slips downstairs every day, with his stupid tea and his stupid hopes, to watch Jon do nothing while Beholding spins around him, at least he knows Rosie approves.)

* * *

_The Vast, then? That’ll be, what--_

**Ozone, mostly. And the sound falling makes, sometimes.**

_What’s the sound falling makes?_

**Not being able to scream because you can’t breathe.**

_... ah._

* * *

It turns out that the proto-mob isn’t congregating to burn the building down.

Which is a shame, Martin thinks, in a purely abstract way. If he’d burned the building down a lot _sooner_ maybe this all could have been avoided. (There were a lot of things he could have done to avoid this.) But given that he can’t get the police to take his calls-- they took the first five, were singularly unhelpful, and then blocked his number, which he thinks might be illegal? But who even knows if laws counts anymore-- and given that he’s not sure Jon would even notice the building burning down around him and he seemed fine with being _stabbed in the chest_ but Martin doesn’t really want to experiment with how far that maybe-invulnerability goes… it’s for the best, is his point, that no one is planning arson.

(Actually, he thinks a few of the people out there _had_ been planning arson-- Rosie wasn’t wrong that there was a distinctly shifty “I would like to do some crimes now” look to some of them-- but those plans have apparently been derailed, the shifty-looking individuals in question bustled out of the group and glared away every time they make a reappearance. Eventually they stop making reappearances. Martin is choosing not investigate why.)

It turns out that the proto-mob is maybe actually more of a proto-cult.

“Oh, that’s nice,” says Rosie cheerily, beaming through the window at them. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it? He is a very _nice_ god, after all, I don’t see why anyone _should_ be getting up in arms about him.”

Martin gives her A Look. She just smiles at him instead.

“How much exactly,” he tries, “Do you know about what’s going on?”

“I’ve worked here for 20 years, dear,” she tells him calmly, and sips her tea.

Outside, the probably-a-cult hushes as an eye blinks open above their heads, all of them craning back to stare at it. It zips around above them for a moment, does a neat loop of the whole group, and then vanishes back into nothing. They all give a little cheer.

* * *

**Slaughter is real screaming. Not pain or fear or anger, not really, not a scream that means anything, just-- noise. Just a lot of noise all at once, sharp and loud and human, on and on.**

_That sounds… bad?_

**Well, it’s all bad. You get used to it.**

_Do you?_

**I did. Or I know them, so they’re mine.**

_You keep saying that. That things are yours._

**Well, yes. Everything is. It’s a crown.**

* * *

It’s not even, in the end, that he really thinks it’ll work. It’s just that he can’t think of anything else to try.

_Thank you for all the tea,_ Jon said, that last moment when Martin could have fixed things and didn’t.

There is an appalling moment where he thinks that he’s made it worse, somehow-- he’s not even really sure how it could _be_ worse, but this, Jon tear-streaked and still hollowed-out and haunted, all the eyes that’ve been swirling around him going dark simultaneously, this is worse, and it’s his fault, he should have, have left well enough alone, it was a _stupid idea_\-- and then it’s… Jon. It’s just Jon, looking back at him, dazed and a little panicked and focused, in a very human way, on the fact that Martin is very, very close to him.

(It’s not _just_ Jon-- he’ll understand that, eventually; it’s Jon and Beholding and Elias, it’s a new and complicated interwoven network of being-- but it _is_ Jon. And that has to be enough.)

* * *

_Hunt?_

**Oh, that’s just blood. Hot and thick and metal and in your mouth and in your veins. Maybe the same blood, both places, moving fast, like your heart’s being driven by a much bigger, faster heart, like you’re just blood too, being moved through something else. Which is true!**

_... right._

* * *

Jon informs him, with a kind of baffled, affectionate frustration, that Elias is coming back to the Institute. That he will be here, in fact, in a little under three hours, and that Martin _should not_ call the police (not that they’ve been useful so far). In the wake of the last thirty minutes (three months, he was gone for _three months_, and he didn’t even _have a plan_) Martin decides that this is not the hill he’s electing to die on and lets it go.

It’s much more satisfying to spend that time gently manhandling Jon around the Archives. Fixing his hair (an absolute disaster, there’s no fixing it at this stage, but Martin perseveres) and trying to convince him to wear Martin’s sweater (it’s chilly in the Archives, which Jon used to dress for, but which the Archivist apparently didn’t notice or care about) and feeling brave enough-- after everything-- to give him a very chaste kiss on the temple. Jon gets hilariously, adorably flustered at every tiny thing Martin does, and he’s going to _savour it_ and that’s fair, he thinks, after everything. After _everything._

Admittedly, Jon getting flustered now includes the room filling with tape recorders, all blanketing the room in static and hysterical whistling sounds and occasionally, if he lets them go on long enough, extremely fast babbling in Jon’s voice about _Martin_.

_\--and his hair does a little flip sometimes that I like and I like the way his eyes scrunch up when he really smiles and he looks like he gives really very good hugs--_

Martin feels a slightly hysterical little lurch in his chest at the realization that he’s never _given Jon a hug_, so this is him _hypothesizing_. But it’s easy to fix-- to just reach out to where Jon is flapping his hands helplessly at the tape recorders as if he might be able to shoo them out like birds that just happen to be repeating his inner monologue, and wrap an arm around his skinny shoulders, and pull him into a hug. Jon goes pliably enough-- stumbles, a little bit, because he wasn’t expecting to move, but he doesn’t go rigid or flinch or do any of the things Martin had somehow always sort of expected. He just lets it happen, and then as soon as he’s pressed against Martin’s chest he kind of _hums_, and presses as close as he can get, hands fluttering up to trace Martin’s arms, his ribs, his spine, not really _returning_ the hug but exploring it. The top of his head fits just beneath Martin’s chin.

The tape recorders return to white noise, which Martin is beginning to suspect is currently the equivalent of Jon’s brain shutting down for a bit.

“Oh,” he says, into Martin’s collarbone.

He laughs, a little bit, into the top of Jon’s head-- catches a glimmer of something liquid and golden and bright out of the corner of his eye and almost stops breathing, but nothing happens, nothing changes. “Yeah,” he says faintly, “Oh.”

This is a thing he can do now, he thinks, a little giddy.

_\--and he does give really very good hugs and I like his laugh also and--_ continues one of the tape recorders.

Jon wriggles free to go attempt to wrangle them again, hissing under his breath at them to _stop talking, I don’t need you, enough!_ and Martin hides his face in one hand so that Jon won’t think he’s laughing at him.

(But he is, a little bit. In a good way. In the very best way.)

* * *

**Flesh is like that too, a little bit. It’s just body. Being a body. Not having one, you know, being one. It’s very heavy, when you really think about all the meat parts of you clinging to the skin of the planet. Being made of meat and feeling like you’re meat. Most people don’t feel like they’re meat, I think.**

_I don’t, um, don’t feel particularly made of meat, no._

**Well, you are, but it’s good that you don’t feel that way.**

* * *

Most of the time, Martin is able to sort of ignore the fact that Peter Lukas is back to lurking around the Institute. He seems to be aware of the way the tides have turned against him, and he goes out of his way to avoid actually interacting with Martin whenever possible. As far as Martin can tell, he spends most of his time following Elias around like a neglected dog.

Which really just makes the occasional moments when Martin catches him in the breakroom, squinting at the microwave and looking vaguely lost, all the more annoying.

“What are _you_ doing here,” he snaps, backpedalling a little bit, instinctively, at the sight of him.

Peter, Martin has learned, doesn’t really flinch. He just goes very, very still, like he’s hoping humans can only see movement.

(It has occurred to Martin, in his more sympathetic moods, that this is because Peter is used to being able to run away without actually moving. That this is his version of a flight reflex, but with all the functionality removed. In his less sympathetic moods, he decides that this is just because Peter is an idiot.)

Peter opens his mouth, visibly reconsiders whatever he was about to say, closes it again and shrugs awkwardly. As soon as Martin steps into the room properly, he gives up on whatever he was trying to do-- Peter is singularly bad with technology, in Martin’s experience, so he was probably stymied by the microwave somehow-- and immediately just… well, it might be a stretch to call it fleeing, but not by much. He skirts around the edge of the room, too, like he’s trying to keep as much physical distance between them as possible, as if Martin might-- what-- attack him? As if _Martin_ is the one who’s _dangerous_ here.

“I think you make him nervous,” a tape recorder informs him from the counter, as soon as Peter is out of sight. (Martin only jumps a little. He’s getting used to the tape recorders talking back. He’s not sure if that’s a good sign.)

Jon sounds mostly contemplative, but there’s a thread of genuine concern under there somewhere. Martin doesn’t understand when _Peter Lukas’ comfort_ became one of Jon’s concerns-- well, he knows intellectually that it has something to do with Elias, but he’s still not sure when Peter Lukas became _Elias’_ concern either-- but here they are. This is the world now, apparently.

“_I_ make _him_ nervous,” he scoffs, peeking into the microwave. There’s a mug of stone cold tea inside. Peter, apparently, was going to _reheat it_. And Martin thought Jon’s tea-habits were bad. He dumps the entire thing down the sink. How he even let a completely full mug of tea get this cold if he actually intended to drink it, Martin has no idea.

“I make him nervous too,” Jon’s tape recorder says sadly, missing the point entirely.

“Well, you are kind of terrifying, these days,” Martin says without thinking.

There’s a long stretch of static from the tape recorder as Martin tries to think of a way to take that back without making it obvious that he’s trying to take it back.

And then the static stops.

When Martin glances at the counter, there’s just an empty space where the tape recorder was.

He sighs and starts making two cups of tea. He’s definitely going to need a peace offering for this conversation.

* * *

**Do you want to hear about Corruption?**

_Not, ha… not, not really, but at this point--_

**You don’t have to. It might help, but you don’t have to.**

_No, it… it’s alright. You can tell me._

**... hm. Well, it’s sweetness.**

_Sweet--_

**Mm. Slow sweetness, the kind that spreads out of open wounds. Rot under the sun, sticky and lingering.**

_That’s… huh. Honestly, I… I thought that would be worse._

**Everything’s worse when you don’t understand it.**

* * *

There are a lot of upsides to Jon being… approximately Jon again. He talks now-- not quite like himself, but he talks-- and he blinks out of Beholding to check in with the world that’s actually around him-- to check that Martin is there, and if Martin _isn’t_ there he has a feeling Jon just goes straight back into Beholding-- and he smiles, sometimes-- close enough to the way he used to, and if sometimes Martin thinks it’s less _am-I-allowed-to-do-this_ than it is _am-I-doing-this-right_, well, that’s… that’s just what it is. He’s doing so much better-- _so much_ better-- he’s awake, and aware, and that’s, really, a lot more than Martin has any right to hope for, given the givens. He’s _Jon_.

(He’s _close enough_. Which is horrible, because it isn’t like he’s… it isn’t like with Sasha, this is Jon, this is the choices that Jon made because Martin didn’t give him _enough_ choices, and. And they’ve talked about it, as much as Jon is really able to talk about what the Watcher’s Crown entailed-- which he isn’t, very, or maybe Martin just isn’t able to understand it-- and Jon has agreed that yes, he was maybe hasty, that he _did_ trust Martin, he just panicked, but it’s done now, and this is where they are. This is what they have. And it’s _fine_. It is.)

(But it’s different.)

The downside to Jon being Jon again is that apparently Elias is a necessary piece of the Beholding puzzle.

Martin understands the… _essentials_ of that-- that Elias is doing something to unhook some of Beholding’s claws from Jon, to give him the breathing space to _be_ Jon again-- and he supposes the details probably aren’t really translatable to a human experience. He’s grateful that Elias is… doing whatever he does. (And he’s _more_ grateful that it seems to be under Jon’s control, that Elias defers to him and relies on him.)

(And he’s also suspicious. Elias never struck him at the type to be happy at anybody’s feet.)

What he doesn’t understand is why this means Elias has to be _at the Institute_ all the time.

“Does he _have_ to be here,” Martin asks, once, only whining a _little bit_, “Like does he need to be close to you for it to… work?”

Jon stares at him for, frankly, an uncomfortable amount of time. 

“No,” he says finally, “I just like when you’re all nearby.”

(And Martin doesn’t really want to examine what _that_ means.)

* * *

_Do you… are you able to understand the Dark, too, then?_

**Yes, of course. I knew that one before, even.**

_R-right, yes, the… the Dark Sun._

**Yes. Lovely nonsense. Very pretty. A bit like Es Mentiras, in that incarnation.**

_So another one you can’t explain, then?_

**What? I did explain it.**

_... sure._

* * *

Martin is no longer sure how he worked at the Magnus Institute for almost four years without realizing that Rosie, the very cheery receptionist he saw every day, was at least hip-deep in occult shenanigans the entire time. Either she is a much better actor than he assumed, he is much less observant than he thought, or she’s decided that this is the right time to just come out and embrace the crazy. Which, to be fair, there probably isn’t a _better_ time for that.

It’s _still_ a little disconcerting to watch her just wave pleasantly at a disembodied eye. (It’s a little _more_ disconcerting to watch the eye kind of… wobble back at her. Jon has decided that he should try non-verbal communication with the eyes, and the results are… mixed.)

But Martin is pretty sure the entire Institute would collapse into chaos if she quit, so he’s counting his blessings while he happens to have them.

“Rosie, have you seen--”

“Peter is hiding from you,” she says, very cheerfully, “And no, I won’t tell you where.”

Martin stares at her. “I just need an expense--”

“You yelled at him about it last time,” Rosie reminds him, still cheerfully. _Very_ cheerfully.

… right. “I could just ask Jon--”

A tape recorder appears, promptly, on Rosie’s desk. Rosie, just as promptly, open a drawer and puts it inside with a gentle little pat. “I think it would be best if you just let me handle Peter, dear. I’ll send the paperwork along.”

“... okay,” he says, helplessly.

He hadn’t even known she _knew_ Peter.

* * *

_Let’s just, um… what’s left…_

**The End.**

_Oh, right, that’s… right._

**It isn’t very interesting. It’s just the smell of a corpse.**

_...isn’t. Uh, isn’t that what Corruption--_

**No, not rot. A corpse. Just dead flesh, before the rot sets in, before all the sickness festers. Cold and clean and… heavy.**

_... so not formaldehyde then?_

**People were afraid of death long before formaldehyde was identified.**

* * *

“I understand,” says Martin, though he wishes he didn’t, “Why you can’t just… stop being Beholding. But why do the _rest of them_ have to stay. Jon, if you’re-- if you _can_ make them all just _stop_\--”

(_If you can snuff Jude Perry out of existence; if you can halt the birth of Extinction just by not wanting it to be part of the world--_)

Jon blinks at him. He’s getting better at remembering to only do it with the two conventional human eyes, so the disconnected eyes twirling in meditative circles around him continue staring out at random directions. Martin isn’t sure if it’s really an improvement, but it’s a change, anyway. 

“Why would I do that?” he asks, and sounds so genuinely baffled that for a moment Martin isn’t sure what to tell him.

“Why… Jon, why _wouldn’t_ you? They’re awful.”

“So am I,” he says. He doesn’t sound concerned about it. He looks a little pleased, actually, to have figured out what he thinks Martin’s talking about. “Awful knowledge, revealed secrets. That’s me.”

Martin sighs, taking Jon’s face in both hands. It can be hard to get him to focus, sometimes, but he does better if Martin is touching him. Remembers to be more present. “Jon, that’s the _Eye_.”

Jon hums agreeably, leaning into Martin’s touch.

“You’re not the Eye,” Martin reminds him. “Or not… not _just_ that.”

Jon blinks again, slowly, and then glances a little to one side. He goes still and distracted for a moment. Martin is starting to recognize it as the sign that he’s talking to Elias, wherever he is. He sighs, smoothes Jon’s hair out of his face while he’s distracted, does his best not to be jealous. He doesn’t understand, completely, _why_ Jon needs Elias, but… well, there’s a lot about the situation that Martin doesn’t completely understand.

“Oh,” says Jon, perking up, “No, I know that. Martin, you don’t have to worry about _that_. It’s… I have enough, now. I can be myself and Beholding. But I _am_ Beholding. We’re the Watcher. We’re one thing. Or… a system. I had to… be a whole system, for a while, but I won’t do that again, I promise.”

“Okay,” Martin says patiently, “That’s good, I’m glad. But we still have to talk about--”

“I need them,” Jon says, matter-of-fact. “They need us. Systems.”

Martin hesitates. “...you, you _need_ the other… entities? Are they, um…”

“They aren’t part of me, but I know them. They’re mine. Everything is mine. It’s a crown. That’s why it works. It’s…” he trails off again for a moment, consulting, “... like wine. The environment, the circumstances it grows in, changes the fear. It’s all fear, but each kind is important. They all have to _be_. People are afraid of us. They’ll be afraid no matter what. If we weren’t here, there wouldn’t be anywhere for it to go. It has to go somewhere. If we stopped-- if I stopped them-- and waited long enough, something else would grow.”

There are few things Martin dislikes more than Jon referring to the eldritch fear gods behind reality as “us”. He takes a deep breath and tries to relax his shoulders. Jon watches with bright interest. “You mean like Extinction.”

“Maybe,” Jon says, incongruously cheerful, though a couple of his eyes dilate sharply, “Maybe something else. I wouldn’t know until it started. It would be new, which might be interesting. But it would… I wouldn’t _know it_. So that might be dangerous.”

He pauses, studying Martin’s face. A few eyes float down to nest in his hair, joining the scrutiny. After a moment, some of the detachment fades from his expression, and he snakes a hand up to touch Martin’s jaw, feather-light. “I _am_ trying.”

He doesn’t sound plaintive at all, just neutral, explanatory, but Martin winces a little anyway. Of course he’s trying. That was the whole point-- Jon trying to fix things, Jon making the best of a bad situation by making it worse on his own terms.

“I know,” he assures Jon, leaning in to press a dry kiss to his forehead. “I know you are.”

“Don’t worry,” he says, and leans away to smile up at Martin, that familiar Jon smile, that _am-I-allowed-to-do-this_ smile (_am-I-doing-this-right_), “I’ll make sure they behave.”

* * *

_So… the Extinction?_

**Nothing. It isn’t.**

_But you’re--_

**It isn’t.**

* * *

Sometimes, even now, with the world blanketed under Jon’s watchful gaze and everyone on the planet aware that the Watcher lives in London, people come to give statements. None of them actually see Jon. They sit in an empty room and talk to a tape recorder that tells them when their statements begin and end. Martin isn’t even sure Jon is aware of them, at first.

“I like that one,” he says, apropos of nothing, sprawled in Martin’s lap on the couch Martin has dragged into the once-storage room in the Archives that is now, functionally, just where he lives. Jon doesn’t sleep, anymore, or do… a lot of human things, honestly, but he was very, _very_ pleased to realize that Martin could stay here with him _all the time_, so the slightly questionable living arrangements are working out so far. 

“You like… what?”

“Maria Conroy. She took notes. She didn’t bring them, but I found them. They’re good notes, considering how It Is Not What It Is feels about being documented.”

Martin squints down at Jon’s face, pausing in idly combing Jon’s hair with his fingers. Jon whines wordlessly, pressing his head back against Martin’s chest until he continues. Sometimes, Martin considers, he is extremely like a cat. “The woman who came in today?” he asks, baffled.

Jon hums agreement. “Maybe I’ll keep her. Do you think she would work in Research?”

“I can find out?”

Jon blinks up at him for a moment, and then smiles. “Yes, that would be good.”

* * *

_What about yours?_

**Hm?**

_Your fear. Or, or Beholding’s, I suppose. What’s that like?_

**Oh, I thought that was obvious.**

**E V E R Y T H I N G.**

* * *

Sometimes it’s like Martin is watching a broadcast of a person, only the antenna’s set a little bit wrong and the picture isn’t coming in clearly, or there’s a little bit of a delay, or the color’s slightly off. And the longer he watches, the more the antenna drifts, and the less accurate the broadcast becomes, until Jon is back to sitting at his desk for 24, 36, 72 hours straight, staring into nothing, only coming alive again when Martin touches him or sets a cup of tea in his hands, like a fairytale creature who doesn’t quite exist if he isn’t needed.

Martin is figuring out, bits at a time, how to correct the antenna.

“Jon,” he says, because reminding him that he has a name helps, “Can you look at me for a second?”

Jon blinks, unfocused, and then several dozen eyes obliging open out of thin air, staring at Martin’s face with rapt attention. “Okay,” says Jon agreeably, animation returning to him by degrees, “I like looking at you.”

Martin smiles at him, because what else is he going to do. Because it’s Jon, trying. “Sure. I wanted to talk to you.”

“I like that, too,” Jon assures him.

“You remember when we talked about the, uh, the other… the entities?”

Jon blinks again, unusually fast, and an expression a _little_ like offense drifts across his face. “Yes,” he says, as a tape recorder hidden somewhere starts replaying the exact conversation.

Right. That was a stupid question. “You said that you… _knew them_. What does that… what does that mean?” (_How much of you is full of fear instead of Jon, how much is there to salvage, is it even worth it to keep trying._)

“...I don’t understand the question. I know them. That’s… what it means.”

(So here’s the thing: correcting the antenna. The more Jon talks about something incomprehensible, the more he finds ways to fit an unspeakable concept into a word small enough for Martin to understand him, the more he remembers what the limits _are_, the closer he gets to being human for a little while. Bits at a time.)

“Okay, well… do me a favour, try to… explain them to me.”

* * *

_(loneliness tasted like:_

_dust_

_mist_

_cold tea)_


End file.
